Friday, 25 February 2011

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of passing a child through your pelvis this is probably (and hopefully) an alien concept. But all too many of you will know exactly what I'm talking about because - let's face it - Pelvic Floor Exercises - are just another one of those things on our 'To do' list, post-pregnancy. Like we don't have fucking enough to do, we now have to spend any spare nanosecond contracting muscles we barely know exist?

Let's be frank, some of us are a little weak in the bladder these days. A little leakage accompanying a belly laugh, a star jump (especially on a trampoline) or any number of other momentarily strenuous activities, just happens sometimes and whilst it doesn't have us ordering'Tena Lady' by the truckload, is enough to make us feel mortified. Only the bravest women actually talk about this openly. "Are you slightly incontinent too?" isn't going to increase your glamour factor or win you any friends at baby group.

Yesterday, my son was resisting bedtime. In the midst of a nappy change my dearest friend and cupcake entrepreneur, Lady Violet, called me on the mobile. With the recent opening of her new venture she has been busy and I hadn't been able to speak to her. I answered the call and my son started running around without his pants on. He followed me into the living room.

"Don't wee on that sofa." I warned him as he clambered up to sit beside me.

Within seconds a silence fell over him, barely noticed by my chit-chattering self, and suddenly something warm and wet was seeping into my clothing. I turned to see him holding his penis and weeing, not only all over my sofa but all over me as well.

Instantly, I finished my long-awaited conversation and as the warm urine on my back and trousers started to turn cold, I felt the rage rising from within and as I shrieked at my son every muscle in my body contorted and there it was......momentary incontinence.

In other words, I was so pissed off that I pissed myself.

I sent an apologetic text to Lady Violet for our curtailed conversation to which she responded.

"Your son gave you a golden shower!!!"

Nice.

Coming up next week........

Plenty of things going on in Troutie's life including........... a belated Valentine's dinner in Chinatown tomorrow night - can Troutie stay sober or will she disgrace herself as per usual? A photoshoot with her sister and a Murder Mystery Birthday Party. Then we have son's first day at Nursery looming and finally....... Troutie's first ever giveaway. Come back next week to get your hands on some free, female friendly porn. I'm not even joking. Tell your friends, your childrens' schoolteachers, your dentist, your husband - and come back to get naughty. Don't be shy..... I just admitted incontinence....thank god this fucking blog is anonymous.....sometimes people, we just have to be brave.

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

On Sunday afternoon at 2pm I have a date with my friend Cupcake. We are meeting at Victoria Station with some of our offspring in tow and travelling back to Brighton together. Our plans are simple – put the kids to bed at hers, throw a couple of drinks down our necks and catch up.

When I arrive at Victoria Station I am ten minutes early and as I surface from underground I get a text message from Cupcake which says “I’m here”.

Instantly I feel that something is amiss.

Cupcake’s usual style is racing for the train with several children balanced on the pram, her red hair trailing behind her, a coffee in one hand and making the train with just seconds to spare.

Cupcake doesn’t do ‘early’ and if she ever was to do ‘early’ she would try to squeeze in some kind of activity, which in turn would make her late.

I find her seated in a café and it would be fair to say that she’s not looking her best.

“I feel like fucking shit.” she says

The whole point of Cupcake’s trip to London was to attend a friend’s birthday party on Saturday night. Naturally I wasn’t expecting her to be the brightest ray of sunshine but the ghostly figure I see before me is quite worrying, especially given Cupcake’s relentless capacity to party. Cupcake usually brushes off hangovers fairly quickly because she simply doesn’t have time for them.

“Oh god” I say “What happened at the party?”

Cupcake goes on to tell me that before she’d arrived at the party she received a text message from the hostess. It seems that the party wasn’t in full swing and swing was exactly what Cupcake was being asked to provide. Cupcake isn’t usually asked to bring swing to a party because it’s taken as given that that’s exactly what she will bring – so if you ask her to liven things up you can pretty much bet that this will be cause for regret come the morrow.

Cupcake breezes in to the beach-themed party in a loud sundress, hat and sunglasses with a bottle of vodka. It seems that everyone has come with a bottle of spirit, but that about half of the guests are light drinkers at best.

Now we have a situation: stacks of booze, nobody drinking it and one Cupcake asked to bring ‘swing’ to a party. And so, rather unsurprisingly, Cupcake starts to drink.

and drink,

and drink

and refill

after refill

after refill

until suddenly……….

she opens her eyes and finds herself in her mother-in-law’s house, laid out like a starfish, still in her party dress (a minor victory there I feel) with absolutely no recollection of how she got there. Somewhere, in the distance of her memory, she sees herself gyrating against a palm tree and trying to leave the party without any shoes on.

It turns out that the host had decided to call Cupcake’s mother-in-law at one o’clock in the morning and ask for her to be collected.

Unlike most mother-in-laws, this one seems mildly amused by her antics and says to her

“Well dear, I haven’t seen you that drunk since that time you lived in London and came home and took all your clothes off.”

Now, if that doesn’t fill you with that creeping sensation of utter shame ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know what will.

Monday, 14 February 2011

Every year on Valentine's Day whilst couples go gooey over one another; over candelit dinners and fine wines, Bushman is sweating it out in the kitchen.

Spare a thought for your chef, ladies and gentlemen, he foregoes his own Valentine delights so that you can have yours.

In the seven Valentines' days we have spent together we have never been able to indulge in that ritual. But with a little creative thinking (usually on my part) we make the most of whatever time we have together. Many years ago we had a midnight feast when he had finished his shift, but this year we had breakfast together.

Its not easy to cook a dish from another culture, especially when you are cooking for a chef. But my first attempt at Jamaica's National Dish wasn't too bad - or so I thought.

Bushman bounced baby sister on his lap while she sucked on various fruits. First born helped himself to everyone else's love toast and took up the salt mill.

Ah, togetherness.......

and it could even have been romantic but instead Bushman turns to me and says

"Yuh know people eat cow tail inna Jamaica?"

"Sort of" I say

"Well back 'ome, a man leave 'im wife because she cook de whole ting, she not even take off di skin!!"

He laughs and I'm not quite sure if that's some kind of warning that if my food isn't up to scratch he'll leave me?

To recreate this romantic breakfast you will need:

One unromantic and hard to impress Jamaican father

One try-hard English mother - still in her pyjamas

One 2 year old son who pours salt on everyone else's food

One 5 month old daughter sucking the life out of a Lychee

This is the recipe I used for Ackee and Saltfish. Personally, If I made this again I wouldn't add spicy tomato sauce as suggested in this recipe - I would use fresh cherry tomatoes instead. You could leave out the ginger, although it did give it a nice kick and there is no reason why you shouldn't use the whole spring onion. But the most important thing is to buy SALTED COD WITHOUT BONES!! Ask the shopkeeper or read the packets very carefully. You will also need to boil the cod for a little longer than suggested in this recipe, 5 minutes is not enough!!

Serve with 'hard food' as they call it in Jamaica which can be anything from boiled yam, boiled potatoes, green bananas, boiled sweet potato, or dumplings (haven't mastered them yet - not like English dumplings). Jamaicans usually make boiled or fried dumplings (check out thisguide to dumplings).

Both Ackee (in tins) and Salted Cod, can be bought in Afro-Caribbean shops or other ethnic foodstores and depending on where you live check out the 'World Foods' section of your supermarket. You might also find hard dough bread (which I used to make the 'Love Toast') - it is dense enough to use a cookie cutter on.

Lastly, we had a delicious combination of juices Carrot and Apple, Clementine and Tropicana's 'Ruby Breakfast' in equal parts.

And of course the delightful fruit platter!!

*Be warned that this is not a cheap meal, a large tin of Ackee can set you back almost 5 pounds! Hard dough bread isn't cheap either.*

Thursday, 10 February 2011

So, while I was blogging last night and writing a mundane post, catching up on blogs and leaving comments for people, I came across this on ‘Jezebel’.

Its all about 'Mommy Business Cards'. Now if you follow the thread through and read all the comments there's a lot of arguing about how being a stay at home mum is a 'real' job. Well, we know that, but picture the scene: you meet another Mum at the swings/needle bins, have a chat and seem to get on well, the kids are playing nicely together and then as you're about to leave she hands you a 'Mum Business Card' covered with pretty little flowers which says 'Mum to Oscar' and her telephone number and asks if you'd like a 'playdate'.

Chances are I'm going to puke and then I would have to stop myself from shooting them. Or maybe I wouldn’t stop myself? What's wrong with writing your number in lipstick on a fag packet (OK maybe in my former life) or exchanging numbers by way of a strange new technology called the mobile phone?

Its great to be a mother, stay- at-home or working, who is proud of what she does; but waving your prissy little cards around is just so unecessary. It's as if you needed it in writing, to remind yourself and everybody else of your breeding accomplishments.

Get a life! Or an identity which doesn’t revolve entirely around your child. How did we come to be such a child-centred culture?

If you were to waste valuable seconds of your short life checking out the official‘Mommy Card Page’you would find the Top Ten reasons to have a ‘Mommy Card’. 'Top Ten' implies that they are more than ten but that they have picked the ten best.

I can assure you that this cannot possibly be the case because at least seven of these reasons are totally and utterly pointless.

The purple bits are the thoughts in my head.

Top 10 Reasons to use your Mommy Cards:

1. New moms you meet and want play dates with - OK. Its twee and doesn’t sell it to me but it does at least make sense.

2. Contact info for Babysitter . - Barely justifiable. Surely if someone is baby sitting your kids they might already have your number? Maybe you might use one of these cards if you went 'Speed Baby Sitter Dating'. (let's face it, it probably exists)

3. Neighbors. – Sorry? I can just imagine knocking on my neighbour’s door (I think she suffers from manic depression and even though I take in her parcels all the time, sometimes she simply ignores me in the hallway) and handing her a card with my telephone number and the words ‘Mother of Rolex and Chardonnay’ on it. I mean, come on, what the fuck is she gonna do with that? Look at it and go "Ah, how cute! You've cured me of my depression." Unlikely.

4. Existing friends (the cards are just too cute not to share) – Are you for real? This is unbelieveably pointless – unless you are on a mission to lose your friends, because they will realise you are a loser.

6. When dropping off your child at someone’s house for a play date or birthday party. - I'm not even going to dignify this one with a response. Playdates are wrong; or maybe just the word 'playdate' is wrong.

7. If your child is lost you can give out the card with their picture on it to help find them. - Or you could just show them a picture from your phone, or the one you have in your wallet, or the tattoo you have of them on your arm. Or to make life easier, don’t lose your child. Or did you ever stop to think that maybe your child is trying to lose you because you are a loser?

8. Keep one in your suitcase or diaper bag in case it gets lost. – And then a stranger will call you up and arrange to meet you to give you back your lost property. And then they will kill you and cook you and eat you and send text messages from your phone making out you are still alive.

9. Will make grandparents smile. - It will be a nervous smile. How did we create such a loser, the kind of person who would actually purchase these ridiculous cards?

10. Just for fun! Remember; this was supposed to be the ten best reasons for purchasing 'Mum Business Cards'. Do these people think we are totally fucking stupid?

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

missing the Caribbean, cleaning out my son's earwax, having my hair cut at the Vidal Sasson Academy, going to jail, spending the night in a Premier Inn in Swindon, walking, discovering I am broke, weaning my daughter, signing my son up for Nursery, thinking about a Murder Mystery Dinner Party, reading 'Who wants to be a poodle? I don't'a hundred times to my son, getting really pissed off with myyoung hot Swedish neighbours, cobbling together dinners out of nothing, watching pornography, trying to get a dead fox removed from outside my window, drinking white wine, whining about not losing weight precisely because I am drinking too much white wine, trying not to drink white wine because I am fat and broke, doing a FUCK load of laundry.

About Me

Bad blogger, bad parent and all round bad girl.
I'm 33 and living with a Jamaican man of the same age. We have one son and a daughter thanks to some very strong cocktails and bad family planning.
I think our relationship works because he doesn't say much and we don't really understand one another when we do talk.
Despite being a 'mother' I can't remove stains from things, rarely iron and HATE 'playdates'.
I love a good blog but don't get the time much these days. I'm one of those horrible bloggers who almost never replies to your comments. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, come on in......